Dear secret service employees…

The NSA tries to recruit students – and one student records that session, which is hilarious.

You really can see the point of view of people working at the NSA, which is pretty much like: „Hey! We’re apolitical! We don’t do the policies for the intelligence. We just do what we’re told.“. Well, believe me, dear NSA employees: There were people in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century that said exactly the same thing and helped building up one horrifying totalitarian state. Some of them did it despite their knowledge. And some of them just didn’t care. Afterwards, most of them regretted their decision not to stand up. And a lot of them were put on trial. No judge cared about their excuse of „orders“ from an terrorizing government. Helping illegal orders to be carried out was still a crime.

I’m definitively not comparing the 3rd Reich with the US – far from it. But I really urge anyone working as an intelligence analyst or at a company collaborating with the secret services to balance their decision with one’s own conscience. Putting your ethics aside with an excuse of being afraid of loosing your job is never a good idea. When the systems switches to another one and surveillance will be seen as something bad (like it did with nearly every country turning to totalitarism and back), the past will outrun you and you will suddenly find yourself on the dark side.

Personally, I believe in democracy. If you firmly believe that what you do in your secret service job is right, justice and the best thing to do to save people, then you should do it. Then your population has asked and deserved the surveillance. And I don’t even say, that surveillance is necessarily a bad thing. As I also do believe in freedom of expression, everybody is free to believe in it. But if you work there despite your knowledge of doing wrong, then you need to realize that you’re complicit in an infrastructure the population has never asked for. An infrastructure that was actually used to virtual invade into countries – even in mine. And one day, you might be held accountable.

You might say: Well, it’s just data. It’s just virtual. I’m an internet generation. I do live in the virtual world just as much as I do in the real one. For me, there is not much difference if you snoop around my flat or around my personal data in my cloud or my email account. For me, it feels like war. It is and stays an invasion and a disregard of sovereignty. And don’t get me wrong: I do believe and know that my country might do something similar. While I don’t believe, many other nations have such a large and powerful secret surveillance system like the US, I do condemn all of similar programs just as much.

Things are moving fast and time’s running out more quickly. We’re building up a virtual „wall“ between a „pro surveillance“ and „anti surveillance“ state and there will be less and less opportunities to take sides – especially if you’re working for one of these services. Edward Snowden made his decision and I wonder if more people will follow him or if all other shaky candidates are driven more by fear than by their ethic standards. At the end, it will be everyone standing up and speaking out for or against it that’ll decide, if we grow into a hidden 1984 society or if we’re able to get around it for at least one time.

picture (c) Adam Hart-Davis